Ron Paul: Make Love Not War.
posted by Josiah Garber on July 31, 2009
in Economics, Fun, Politics, War & Peace
Amazingly Funny Interview with Chris Matthews
posted by Josiah Garber on July 29, 2009
in Fun, Politics
Enjoy!
| The Daily Show With Jon Stewart | Mon – Thurs 11p / 10c | |||
| Chris Matthews | ||||
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The Federal Reserve is Running Scared
posted by Josiah Garber on July 28, 2009
in Economics, Politics
Email out of control?
posted by Josiah Garber on July 25, 2009
in Personal Development
This video will show you how to use your email effectively. It’s worth the hour of time. Believe me: this has totally changed the way I look at email. It has jumpstarted my entire system of organization, inspired me to implement the GTD system and saved me a ton of time. Enjoy.
Bailout Total So Far… nearly 24 Trillion Dollars!
posted by Josiah Garber on July 24, 2009
in Economics, Politics
Yes that’s 24 Trillion with a T. Uncommonly known as $24,000,000,000,000.00
These numbers don’t get reported every night on the news. I thought you might be interested in knowing that your government has spent nearly 24 Trillion dollars on bailouts so far.
What will be the effects of this reckless spending? Time will certainly tell… It is likely that the effects will be similar to what has happened in the past. A short lived boom followed by inflation and recession. Or perhaps this time we will skip the boom and move directly to stagflation.
This isn’t the only problem facing our country monetarily. Check out what David Walker has to say about it.
To learn more about booms and busts and the effects of expanding the monetary base,
Google: Austrian Economics or Weimar Republic or Zimbabwe Inflation.
Clinton: US Won’t Hesitate to Use Military Against Iran
posted by Josiah Garber on July 23, 2009
in Politics
Not a Threat, It’s a Promise, Secretary of State Tells CFR
by Jason Ditz, July 15, 2009
In a high-profile policy address before the Council on Foreign Relations (CFR), Secretary of State Hillary Clinton declared that the US wouldn’t not hesitate to use its military to “defend our friends, our interests, and above all, our people” during the segment discussing Iran.
She elaborated on the declaration with “this is not an option we seek nor is it a threat; it is a promise.” Clinton also warned Iran that the US offer to hold talks, which she had previously said she didn’t expect to work to begin with, would not be open-ended and that “our willingness to talk is not a sign of weakness.”
Today’s comments are the latest in a long line of bellicose rhetoric coming from the Secretary of State. Last month during a television interview she said that Iran was risking the possibility of a US invasion, citing the disastrous 2003 invasion of Iraq as a model.
The US has been demanding that the Iranian government abandon its civilian nuclear energy generation program, and several officials have claimed, despite a stark lack of evidence, that Iran is working on nuclear weapons. The IAEA has pointed out no evidence for the accusation exists, and America’s own National Intelligence Estimate says they don’t believe Iran has an active weapons program either.
Cheney Sweats Out the Summer
posted by Josiah Garber on July 22, 2009
in Politics, War & Peace
by Ray McGovern, July 16, 2009
So far the summer has been mild in the Washington, D.C., area. But for former Vice President Dick Cheney the temperature is well over 100 degrees. He is sweating profusely, and it is becoming increasingly clear why.
Cheney has broken openly with former President George W. Bush on one issue of transcendent importance — to Cheney. For whatever reason, Bush decided not to hand out blanket pardons before they both rode off into the sunset.
Cheney has complained bitterly that his former chief of staff, I. Lewis “Scooter” Libby, should have been pardoned, rather than simply having his jail sentence “commuted.” The former Vice President told the press that Bush left Libby “sort of hanging in the wind” by refusing to issue Libby a pardon before Bush left office. Libby had been convicted of perjury, obstruction of justice, and lying to federal agents investigating the leak of a former CIA operations officer’s identity.
“I believe firmly that Scooter was unjustly accused and prosecuted and deserved a pardon, and the President disagreed with that,” Cheney said. He would disclose no details of his efforts to lobby Bush on Libby’s behalf, saying they would be “best left to history.”
It is getting close to history time. You do not need to be a cracker-jack analyst to understand that Cheney is feeling betrayed — that he is thinking not of Libby, but of himself, and fearing that, if our system of justice works, he could be in for some serious, uncommuted jail time.
Overcoming the fear of failure
posted by Josiah Garber on July 21, 2009
in Personal Development
from Bob Lotich at http://www.christianpf.com
This last weekend I had multiple conversations about failure, success, and overcoming the fear of failure. It got me thinking a lot about my battle with the fear of failure and things that have helped me in the past.
For years I wanted to start a business, but was afraid that I would fail. I, just like many others, had heard some of the rumored statistics that the vast majority of businesses fail and was frightened by them. I wanted to step out, but I was longing for some kind of assurance that I would be successful.
WSJ Trashes Goldman: Subsidized “Goldie Mac” Making Billions At Taxpayer Expense
posted by Josiah Garber on July 17, 2009
in Economics
The Wall Street Journal’s editorial page this morning reminds us that Goldman Sachs is still operating under an implicit government guarantee that puts taxpayers on the line for any losses while its partners enrich themselves from profits.
It’s ugly.
Of course, if the feds do let CIT fail, this will only confirm that the only certain survivors in the current market are banks big enough that the government figures it must bail them out. Just ask the many small banks that have been rolled up by the FDIC at a rate of two a week since the beginning of the year, with eight so far in July alone. That can only strengthen the likes of Goldman, which apparently needs no help printing money anyway.
Goldman’s traders profited in the second quarter from taking advantage of spreads left wide by the disappearance of some competitors (Lehman, Bear Stearns) and the risk aversion of others (Morgan Stanley). Meantime, Goldman’s own credit spreads over Treasurys have narrowed as the market has priced in the likelihood that the government stands behind the risks it is taking in its proprietary trading books.
Goldman will surely deny that its risk-taking is subsidized by the taxpayer — but then so did Fannie Mae and Freddie Mac, right up to the bitter end. An implicit government guarantee is only free until it’s not, and when the bill comes due it tends to be huge. So for the moment, Goldman Sachs — or should we say Goldie Mac? — enjoys the best of both worlds: outsize profits for its traders and shareholders and a taxpayer backstop should anything go wrong.
What’s worse, letting CIT fail might not help this situation at all. Rather than clearing the way for market discipline to reassert itself, CIT’s failure might only reify the policy of Too Big To Fail.
Financial firms that are deemed too small to be rescued will find credit hard to come by and expensive, which will incent them to grow or sell themselves to a systemically important firm. In short, we’re increasing the concentration of financial power and hence systemic risk in the largest Wall Street firms that led us into this mess.
The Jobs Problem
posted by Josiah Garber on July 16, 2009
in Economics, Politics
Mises Daily by Llewellyn H. Rockwell, Jr.
Just how bad is the current plague of economic fallacy?
Consider the front page of the New York Times today (July 15, 2009):
SEACHANGE IS SET IN A HEALTH PLAN — House Democratic leaders took a big step toward guaranteeing health insurance for most Americans on Tuesday as they unveiled a bill that detailed how they would expand coverage, slow the growth of Medicare, raise taxes on high-income people and penalize employers who do not provide health benefits to their workers.
A BLEAKER PATH FOR WORKERS TO SLOG — In California and a handful of other states, one out of every five people who would like to be working full time is not now doing so. It is a startling sign of the pain that the Great Recession is inflicting, and it is largely missed by the official, oft-repeated statistics on unemployment.
It’s sometimes said that economics is a difficult subject because it requires high-level, abstract thinking, and tracing of cause and effect through several logical steps. And yet, really, how hard can it be to see the contradiction in the above?
Here is the problem. Mandating benefits for employees imposes costs on employment. The would-be worker bears the cost. It makes the worker more expensive to hire. The employer has to pay not only a salary but also a benefit. If you make it more expensive to hire people, fewer people will be hired.
It is no different from eggs at the supermarket. If they are $2 each, you will purchase fewer of them — you will economize. This is nothing but the law of demand: consumers will demand less of a good at a higher price than of a good at a lower price. A salary plus benefits amounts to a price that the employer must pay to purchase the work of a laborer. At a higher price, less work will be purchased by the employer.